Your morning dose of righteous indignation, via Mr. Charles P. Pierce at Esquire:
… Comes now this pure piece of manufactured product, this vacant replicant of American plutocracy, to lecture a country in the middle of a fragile recovery from an economic disaster brought on by the other soulless replicants on the topics of our vanishing work ethic, and the great moral cleansing power of onrushing poverty. And, because he cares less about the country he’s planning to lead than he does about the next nickel he can squeeze out of it, he’s doing so with rhetoric that owes more to George Wallace than it does to George Romney, who was a decent Republican in the days before greasy-beaked vultures like his spalpeen hijacked the party. (Which is pretty much what E.J. Dionne was saying recently.) Willard is working the old poor-people-are-robbing-you-blind melodeon again while his real targets are anyone who receives any kind of federal government assistance of any kind whatsoever. And don’t fall for the old “states do it better” dodge. Willard knows full good and well that the states can’t carry this kind of load, either, and that the costs will just get passed down to lower and lower levels of government until nobody can pay for anything, and the programs that he’d like to see eliminated because it will help him get elected simply disappear…
__
He is really the only true class warrior in the race. He’s counting on prejudice and ignorance because he is running in the Republican primaries and that’s the coin of the realm. But he’s also counting on the desperate dreams of desperate people who want to believe that there is a big bag of money out there that’s going to the Wrong People, and that, if someone would only re-direct it, their lives would be better. Well, there is a big bag of money out there, and it is indeed going to the Wrong People, and those would be the people in whose company Willard Romney has spent his entire, cosseted, entitled existence. He has embarked on a divisive campaign of misdirection, hoping against hope that nobody notices that he mortgaged himself to his ambition on an adjustable rate, and that he’s underwater on his soul.
Keep reminding your low-information-voter relations and acquaintances:
When you vote for a modern Republican, you are voting for a bad person.
NobodySpecial
What’s more depressing is that most of your Reps, D or R, are just as closeted in wealth.
I think what really killed Liberalism in the ’60s and beyond was that all the people who REALLY suffered in the Depression died out thanks to those shortened lifespans, and almost everyone who was left thinks suffering is virtuous.
Raven
No Prisoners!
jeffreyw
@NobodySpecial:
I am a most virtuous man, I suffer so seeing you in pain.
JoeShabadoo
@NobodySpecial:
I hear people actually talk about a Jeb Bush upset this year or him running in 2016.
We live in an aristocracy.
SiubhanDuinne
I’ve missed Charlie Pierce. He should never again be permitted to take days off, Christmas or no Christmas.
Triassic Sands
No one my age, who’s followed politics as closely as I have during my lifetime, should be capable of being surprised by the level of dishonesty in a modern American political campaign.
However, ignoring all the lies, half-truths, and disingenuousness being spewed by the likes of Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, and the “late” Herman Cain, I’m truly amazed by the depth and breadth of dishonesty that Romney has chosen to inject into our national discourse.
The great challenge faced by the Left in the upcoming campaign, assuming Romney lies his way to the nomination, could be to get people to see what Romney is doing without our running afoul of Godwin’s Law and the discrediting effect it’s existence could have on recognizing exactly where Romney got his playbook. I think it’s fair to predict that no matter how egregious the lie, the MSM will condemn anyone who connects Romney with Hitler via “Die Große Lüge.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Triassic Sands: I would advise going with the “Republicans think that you are stupid” angle.
WereBear (itouch)
There’s no Grampy Walnuts treating you to barbeque. There’s no backslapping W giving you derogatory nicknames. There’s only an animatronic billionaire for whom familiarity bleeds contempt.
Sure, he’s going to get a certain amount of teeth gritting votes anyway. But I’m guessing less than before.
sherparick
I know Romney is suppose to be the “inoffensive” candidate, but really, he makes me want to vomit more than any of the others.
agrippa
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, the Republicans do think that you are stupid. And, “you” prove it when “you” elect them to office.
Triassic Sands
@sherparick:
I think your instincts are correct.
Cermet
@Triassic Sands: That is a lot of win … if I just could figure out the German.
handsmile
I thought this excerpt from Pierce’s article captured more viscerally the fundamental fraudulence of the Romney campaign:
Brachiator
This is insipid. If you think this would change anyone’s mind, you really have to wonder who the supposedly “low information voters” really are.
Many posters have noted how their GOP leaning friends and relatives dig in their heels when challenged. And your strongest play is to suggest that they are stupid and making immoral decisions with their votes?
You clearly want to lose every political battle.
And while I like Charles Pierce, he is writing for political wonks. Nobody remembers George Romney. To many people, the only historical Republicans are Lincoln and Reagan, who lived next door to each other.
I probably dislike Mitt more than Pierce does, but I don’t see his stuff working for anyone but true believers.
Cacti
@handsmile:
Romney is an older version of the Winklevoss brothers from the movie The Social Network.
His lack of political success is probably the first time in his life that things didn’t work out for him exactly the way they were supposed to, and boy does it chap his ass.
catclub
@JoeShabadoo: The key difference between George W Bush and Sarah Palin is that Bush was born into the aristocracy.
Cacti
@Brachiator:
Agree that few undecideds will be reading Charlie Pierce, but he identifies Romney’s weaknesses well.
Romney has been running for 5 years now, and can’t crack the 25 percent barrier because he makes a bad impression. Voters find him insincere, and he contributes to that by interacting with regular people as though they were a quaint museum exhibit.
“Mitt doesn’t understand you/is out of touch” is a message that will resonate.
Nancy Irving
“he’s underwater on his soul” –
Brilliant!
Citizen_X
@Brachiator:
I agree with your points, but what do you suggest? It’s not only anecdotal; there is clinical support for people digging in their heels when shown contradictory evidence. How do you get beyond that wall of resistance?
Brachiator
@Citizen_X:
Don’t know. People have to see, or deeply feel, that their lives are getting better. This happened with Bill Clinton, who was able to shrug off GOP attacks and keep the confidence of voters. Obama has had a tougher battle, in part because the GOP learned from their mistakes and now are relentlessly nasty.
But it is also more than people handling contradictory evidence. A co worker recently displayed an almost stereotypical Orange County California fear. She mentioned how she and her parents were “normal white people,” and that the Democrats wanted to take all that they have rightfully earned and give it to people who don’t deserve it. They see themselves as besieged by Visigoths threatening to overrun their Roman Republic.
I don’t know how you can overcome this combination of fear and sense of false entitlement.
...now I try to be amused
@Citizen_X:
You beat me to it. I wish I knew the answer to your question too. Many Republicans (my family included) aren’t evil and they aren’t moneygrubbers. How do you convince people who believe they’re doing the right thing that they are really supporting evil? That’s a hard thing to admit to oneself.
Maybe to answer is to just state your case and accept that they will reject it initially, and maybe reject you too. If it plants the initial seed of doubt, or reinforces messages they’ve received from other sources, then it might succeed eventually.
Some beliefs can’t be shattered; they can only be eroded. I think that’s what the Right did to liberalism over the last four decades.
[Crossposted with Brachiator.]
Brachiator
@Cacti:
I agree with you. But a lot of the GOP base didn’t care for John MCain. And so the strategy was to try to sell the voters on his Senate experience and War Hero(tm) status, and to push hard the sparkly Sarah Palin.
The similar strategy might be to pair Mitt with a charismatic VP choice, and to try to sell his supposed business acumen.
gaz
what, no Veritas?
LOL
FlipYrWhig
Yeah, about these “desperate people,” they’re called Republicans. Resentment about how someone else is getting a free ride from the government is probably 88% of why anyone votes Republican, to wit, to punish the bogeyman who took your hard-earned money. And the other 12% has to do with being disturbed about teh buttsecks and teh baybeez.
Cris (without an H)
Word of the day: “spalpeen.”
Brandon
I have long been an advocate of ignoring the GOP clown car fail parade and focussing on Romney because he has been getting a free pass while all the attention has gone to the short comings of the morans that everyone knows will never win. However, I am wondering now if my instincts betray my fundamental lack of insight into the conservative and Village psyche. Because we know that they will always be for whatever Democrats are against or vice-versa, perhaps we should all just embrace Romney and say nice things about him. That will surely defeat him faster than hundreds of clever posts exposing his evil from Charles Pierce.
Bulworth
Pierce also had this to say about South Carolina’s latest attempt at voter disenfranchisement:
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/south-carolina-voting-rights-6626281#ixzz1hqfy5eMs
carpeduum
Nice rant. I give it a 4/5.
MCA
@FlipYrWhig: Agree wholeheartedly. Looks like you took the lessons of Nixonland to heart.
Just listen to any Republican down the street talk about politics. It is always and ever about resentment and little more. Government’s too big = someone else is getting something from my tax dollars, and why am I not rich? It’s why the GOP is so concerned with stanching any attempt at populist talk from a Democrat as “class warfare” and terrified by OWS – they’ve had a hegemony on running the class warfare, which they’ve fashioned into a civil war between various parts of the 99% while the richest watch from the sidelines, for 40 years. As soon as someone can figure out how to turn that resentment outward from the lower, middle and upper middle classes to the highest, the Republican Party is toast.
CarolDuhart2
@Brachiator: But at least John McCain could talk about his war experience and say that he had some suffering in his life. He could be warm and funny at times too as well as Cranky Grandpa. Romney? What experiences has he had that people could relate to at all? He’s not funny, he’s not charming, and he doesn’t have the noblesse oblige personality that says, “I’m well off, but I understand and acknowledge that others aren’t so well off, and I want to help”.
No campaign tactic can deal with such a deficit.
Ella in New Mexico
I don’t care a whit if Charles Pierce is a writer for “True Believers”–the fact that every single one of his blog posts qualifies for “The Moore Award” is what satisfies my sanity.
Brachiator
@CarolDuhart2: The GOP was selling McCain’s war experience to try to prove that he had foreign policy chops. They had to downplay the suffering since they were officially pro torture.
I agree with you about Romney’s deficits. This is why I think the GOP will look hard for a charismatic VP choice.
But here is the irony, the totally delicious irony. The Republicans have been insistent that Real Americans ™ cannot relate to Obama, that he is elitist and aloof. That he just does not understand the common man. That he is not even a real Christian.
And so, they turn to Romney?
Hilarious.
Triassic Sands
@Cermet:
Die Große Lüge = the big lie
Note: Babelfish translates it as “the large lie,” which misses the feeling of the normal historical translation. Google translate gets it right. That’s the difference between simple literal translation and idiomatic, culturally sensitive translation.
Triassic Sands
And when you vote for a bad person…chances are that makes you a bad person.
maidhc
Does Pierce know what “spalpeen” means? He seems to think it means something like “whelp”. Actually it means a migrant farm worker, or by extension a rascal.